Radio communication systems, such as cellular systems, provide users with the convenience of mobility along with a rich set of services and features. This convenience has spawned significant adoption by an ever growing number of consumers as an accepted mode of communication for business and personal uses. As a result, cellular service providers are continually challenged to enhance their networks and services as well as increase their customer base. New services require development of new standards. Such development, unfortunately, can pose compatibility issues with existing or legacy systems.
One area that has received significant attention concerns accommodating single carrier technology in a multi-carrier system. Traditionally, this has entailed introducing greater complexity in a mobile node to detect the multiple carriers. Beyond the increased complexity and associated cost, the detection process imposes a heavy demand on operating power, and thereby, reduces talk-time. Further, from the network side, it is recognized that all of the multiple carriers are utilized irrespective of the traffic load. The drawback with such an approach is that precious network capacity is wasted if the load does not fully utilize the full capacity of the carriers.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to provide a multi-carrier system that can efficiently support backward compatibility with a single carrier system.